Taking Advantage of the Opportunity

In today's NY Times Scott Anderson argues that many suicides are preventable. He contends that a lot of people kill themselves because of a momentary passion and an available means of doing so. He cites a number of situations where it does appear that people would not kill themselves if the opportunities were not so plentiful:

• In England coal gas was used to heat homes and fire stoves for many years. By the late 1950s 2,500 people a year killed themselves by putting their head in the stove. This accounted for about half the annual suicides. Over the next decade and a half coal gas was phased out and replaced by natural gas. Guess what? Suicides dropped by a third and have remained constant.
• In Washington, D.C., half of the suicides in the 1980s were from people jumping off the Ellington Bridge. The Taft Bridge is very close to the Ellington but very few jumped off that bridge. The railing of the Taft was chest-high, that of the Ellington was at belt level. It took more effort to jump off the Taft. The city put up a suicide barrier at the Ellington and the number of suicides went to zero, while those at the Taft stayed basically the same.
• A study, "Where Are They Now", of people who survived a jump from the Golden Gate between 1937 and 1971 showed that only 6% of them committed suicide subsequently.
• Public health studies have shown that states which have more gun owners have two-three times the incidence of suicide by guns.

Anderson has some interesting points.